The South is a big region in a big country.That's the main thing. We're "so deep into that landscape we did not realize/ we'd been talking in accents all our lives"
--Pierce Pettis, "Little River Canyon"

Friday, December 12, 2008

raised on robbery: making the best shortbread

"I'm a pretty good cook, I'm sitting on my gro-cer-ieeeeeees" is the Joni Mitchell line that runs through my mind a lot from Court and Spark. December translates to my life in the South via food, friends, and family. It takes a lot of focused effort to cook and eat your way through a Southern holiday, and I don't mind spending the time doing it.

There are many witty breakdowns of the Southern food groups, all focusing on pork fat, caffeine, etc., but for my part, let me just say that my genius-inspired artistic materials have always centered around butter and sugar. I can make a clove-studded dry cured Virginia ham (preferably home-cured Kentucky cut) with the best of them, along with the required homemade yeast rolls or beaten biscuits, depending upon which Southern state we're in when Christmas arrives. But my heart, darling, belongs to that cocaine of the Southern palate, that white powder of progress: Sugar.

Classically, shortbread is a late arrival in my family Sugar history. Sure, I remember it from childhood, but back then the real stars were the Lane Cake--a two layer, rather low but impressively spread out white cake with a fruit andbourbon filling, frosted with fluffy white 7 Minute Frosting with a blizzard of freshly grated coconut--and the classic tall pristine white fresh coconut cake whose process began when you went to the store to pick out the very one right coconut that would yield enough juice to make the basting syrup for the layers. I have made my grandmother's fresh coconut cake many, many times, and it never takes me less than a solid day. Then there was the Christmas morning windfall of sugar as my grandfather dusted off the punch bowl and began beating with a hand rotary mixer the dozen eggs he always started with for the first bowl of egg nog. At Thanksgiving we had dinners, but at Christmas we had sideboards. I didn't really understand the necessity of shortbread until much later in life. But that didn't mean that I didn't take to it with any less cell-level love.

The following recipe has evolved over the last three decades. Christmas does not begin until the first batch is in the oven nor does it end until that magical point in January when we look in the shortbread tin one last time and find nothing but a few good crumbs.

Cream butter and add sugar in a good stand mixer, beating until well blended. Add flour, one cup at a time until the mixture won’t hold any more flour and stay“bonded.” It should feel like Play-Doh. (The crumbs must bind together when pressed, so never use cold butter, tempering it in the microwave if you have to.)Too much flour, and the dough will be too crumbly; too much butter and the finished cookie will be too crunchy and not dense enough to the tooth.

Pat mixture into a clean, perfectly dry jelly roll pan (must have sides).Pat until smooth, then take the back tines of a fork and draw linesacross the dough. Bake at 300 degrees for about 30 minutes or untillightly golden. Watch your oven. If your oven is too hot, the bars will become too brown on the bottom. If your oven is not hot enough, the bars will stay pasty and pale and will never turn out right. Adjust accordingly. What you are looking for at this stage is a light tinge of gold. When bars reach that desired shade, remove pan from oven and turn heat down to about 175 degrees. Take a sharp knife and cut the dough into the size squares you want. (I personally like about 1 ½ inch squares.) Do this now while the dough can still be cut.

Return pan to oven and leave about an hour. Remove pan and take all of the little squares and turn them on their sides so that air can flow evenly around them. Return pan to the oven once again and leave for hours. It’s even OK to turn heat down to 150 degrees and let the pan sit in the oven all night. Do a taste test. If the squares are mellow throughout and not doughy, then they are ready to packinto airtight tins.

Shortbread has to “cure,” kind of like a ham. It is better a week after you make it. Make it about 50 times and you will truly understand the difference in brands of flour, butter, and different ovens.

In California they serve warm shortbread with desert wine. In Virginia they serve it with tea. I’ve never had it served with anything it did not somehow suit better than anything else on the sideboard, perhaps with the exception of CHEESE STRAWS, but that’s later......

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Website: www.amgarner.com

Video of Co. Rd 14 Tour

View the new video with me narrating a tour of County Rd. 14 at www.amgarner.com and click on HEAR ANITA.

Frank's Peas

Talking in Accents: Diversity in Southern Fiction

It is easy to make up characters who live in double-wide mobile homes, wear beehive hairdos and feed caps, never put a 'g' on the end of a participle...; who aspire only to own a bass boat, eat something fried, speak in tongues. What is difficult is to take the poor, the uneducated, the superstitious, the backward, the redneck...and make them real human beings, with hopes and dreams and aspirations. Tony Earley

Other places to visit (and don't forget to take the County Road 14 Photo Tour, right after POSTS)

UNDENIABLE TRUTHS

The Southland with Blue Sky

County Road 2 Tour

When you turn onto County Rd. 2 in early September, look for the Dove Hunt signs, which mean that on the following Saturday, a dove hunt will be organized in one of the fields.

Dove Hunt Here

Drive through five or so miles of rolling fields and suddenly you find you have arrived at the scene of the Dove Hunt. A truck is parked near the main road (Co. Rd. 2) and a man sits at a table, signing in participants and spelling out the rules. The hunt takes place in the large fields where corn has been harvested. (You can see the stubble around the Dove Hunt Here sign.) The doves love to scavenge the fields for spilled grain.

Cotton on Gunwaleford Road

The view from the front doors of the church.

Sunrise: Picking Peas off County Rd. 2

Drive five or six more miles through County Rd. 2's fields and you'll come to a crossroads.I got this shot just as the sun was peaking over the horizon in one of the big fields off Gunwaleford Rd. ( County Rd. 2 is also called Gunwaleford Road.) Frank Johnson's ancestors lived on this land while it was still a reservation. He plants a large field every year in corn and another in the best purple-hulled peas you've ever eaten. When the corn and, later, peas are ready to harvest, he starts calling all the neighbors. The best thing to do is to get up before dawn to pick peas. The fields are cool and the only sound is the breeze. It took my husband and me two hours to pick plenty of peas to eat now and freeze for later. The morning glories climb the stalks of the pea plants.

Morning glory

The peas in the fields are covered in morning glories that are open for sun rise.

Pea Sheller

Spending two hours picking peas is one thing. Spending eight hours shelling them is another. My suggestion: take them to the pea shelling machine. Other cool stuff at this store: sticky paper spider traps, local honey, good waterproof duck hunting boots. The proprietor is a friendly guy who will give you helpful hints about pea picking and how to store the peas spread out to dry overnight for the best results from the pea shelling machine.

Coldwater Seed and Supply

Home of the pea sheller. OK, technically you have to drive back into town for this, but if you've picked several bushels of peas, believe me, it's worth it.

The Lake Winks Silver

Further out Gunwaleford Road is Sunset Beach on the Tennessee River, within sight of the Natchez Trace bridge. This part of the Tennessee is Pickwick Lake, smallmouth bass heaven. The large hybrid striped bass also have seasonal runs. Catfish up to 100 lbs. have been caught in the locks at Pickwick Dam. Windsurfing days are best in spring and early fall when the seasonal changes bring wind warnings for area lakes.

Coon Dog Cemetery

Continuing the tour, bring a camera, a cooler, and some tick spray. It's a short ride to the Coon Dog Cemetery.

Head stone at the Coon Dog Cemetery

If you take Co. Rd. 2 all the way to the Natchez Trace Bridge and then follow the Trace across the Tennessee River, you will enter Colbert County where the Coon Dog Cemetery is found.

Head stone at the Coon Dog Cemetery

I can't imagine naming a dog High Pocket. When I'm naming a dog, I always try to envision what I would feel like calling the name loudly if the dog became lost. "Here, High Pocket." No, I don't think so. Too impersonal. But I love High Pocket's stone, love the way the dog is waiting on his/her master, or maybe just stretched out in the shade of the porch in an Alabama August. Someone really loved High Pocket.

November 1

They just couldn't leave

Some of the white pelicans stayed through the summer.

January

Thanksgiving Morning, 2014.

START YOUR TOUR with Coosa County Road 14

This just about sums it up. Literally and figuratively.

A Rocky Ford

Before there was a road, wagons forded the creek on these rocks. To the left just out of the frame is a large white sand bar. The bluff in the background climbs up a hundred feet or so and is covered in mountain laurel laced with wisps of Spanish moss. Where North Alabama meets South Alabama.

Geocaching. Sort of.

Locking in coordinates.

MORE COOSA. Geocaching, sort of.

Dovetailed logs on corner of cabin.

Interior logs

The cabin has log walls inside.

one of the deer paths

Ammonium nitrate makes the grass green and sweet

No one agrees when I say we should use the hose to spray off the mud

...standing beside muddy Jeep tires

Moss grows on the flat rocks

Waverly in Alabama

Waverly can play a reel fast and pure enough to make your heart spin.

Sears Chapel Church

Built right before the Civil War by my relatives who made furniture down the hill on Hatchett Creek, Sears Chapel held services only on the first Sunday of the Month. There was an outhouse, no air conditioning, plenty of wasps circling the light fixtures that hung from chains from the high ceilings. More often than not, we were late for services so we just drove on by and looked for somewhere to have Sunday lunch. Kowaliga was a favorite. Or barbecue at Cotton's. Growing up I kept my clothes in a pine wardrobe built by the same people who built the church. My daughter's dresses hang there today.

Coosa County Musicians

Think of this photo as you read "The Mayor of Nowhere" in UNDENIABLE TRUTHS.

Churchyard

This is where we're all buried. Except the ones who died before the church was built. They're buried out in the woods, and every twenty years or so, we visit the graves. To make sure they haven't just up and left.